If they had reviewed O’Brien’s extraordinary career, which they must have, it was there in bloody detail. O’Brien, 54, the son of a salesman who nowadays flies to Davos on his personal Gulfstream 550 jet, had executed a similar strategy to wrest control of
Independent News & Media
.

At INM, Ireland’s largest newspaper publisher, it was a slow burn boardroom coup. Last year, O’Brien removed the chief executive, chairman and chief financial officer within four months.

O’Brien receives a medal from the Haitian president. He is now the largest private investor in Haiti.
AFR

In total, six INM directors resigned or were ousted in that time.

O’Brien was playing for keeps in winning INM from his adversary,
Tony O’Reilly
, whose family had controlled the newspaper group for 40 years.

O’Brien owns one-third of INM and is Ireland’s biggest media proprietor, which adds to his various titles such as Ireland’s second richest man, with an estimated wealth of $US5 billion.

O’Brien’s cherubic features may be deceiving. He’s described by those who know him as charming, pugnacious and a networker, which certainly fits with how he’s built his career.

Related Quotes

Company Profile

Born in Dublin, O’Brien was by his own admission a reluctant student who “did as little as possible and enjoyed myself".

Eventually he was suspended from school after he drove his mother’s Renault in a figure of eight on a school cricket pitch.

Fortunately, the school rugby team needed him and he was allowed back to school after three months. During his three-month suspension, he spent time learning the art of being a salesman from his father.

Despite being a less than promising student, O’Brien went on to study history and politics at University College Dublin. Later, he obtained an MBA at Boston College, armed with a glowing reference from Irish politician Maurice Manning.

Bill Clinton is a friend

O’Brien had shown early a talent for cultivating connections and this continued throughout his career. Former US President
Bill Clinton
describes him as a friend. The two have worked together on charity projects in Haiti.

After college, O’Brien pursued a career in radio and later founded Esat Telecom Group, a telecommunications company, which bid against Tony O’Reilly for Ireland’s second mobile phone licence in 1995.

Esat was the victor and O’Brien made his fortune by selling the listed mobile phone company to BT in 2000 for $US2.4 billion at the height of the dotcom bubble. O’Brien made more than $240 million and was lauded as one of the Celtic Tiger generation, a reference to Ireland’s booming economy.

However, O’Brien’s winning of the mobile licence was controversial. A judicial tribunal that sat for more than a decade found O’Brien provided money to a government minister to secure the licence. O’Brien has strongly refuted the findings, which he has described as “fundamentally flawed".

He has denied ever making any payment to a government minister.

On Valentine’s Day this year, O’Brien was awarded €150,000 ($225,000) by the Irish High Court after it found he was defamed in an article in the Irish Daily Mail, which suggested his charity work in Haiti was to deflect from the tribunal’s findings.

The Esat scandal proved to be a speed bump in O’Brien’s career. He’s known as one of Ireland’s leading businessmen and learned from some of the country’s best businessmen, such as Dermot Desmond, who once owned the London City Airport, Ryanair founder Tony Ryan, for whom O’Brien worked as a personal assistant, and packaging king Michael Smufit.

After Esat, O’Brien went on to invest in some technology stocks with mixed results. A better investment proved his decision to develop a golf course and resort on Portugal’s southern coast, and property development remains one of his business interests.

Success would bite again for O’Brien in telecommunications when he built Digicel in the Caribbean and Pacific, where it’s now a major telecommunications company. Cricket tragics would know it better for sponsoring the West Indies cricket team. Digicel, a private company, is focused on developing markets and has been most recently bidding to get a mobile phone licence in Burma.

O’Brien, who’s married with four children and resides in Malta, also owns and has a range of stakes in other companies from aircraft leasing, energy exploration to service stations. He has held stakes in the Celtic Football Club and contributed to half the salary of Giovanni Trappatoni, Ireland’s football manager. His profile has risen more over the years for his decision to use his millions to take aggressive positions in Irish companies and now an Australian company. Aside from his board coup at INM, O’Brien took a stake in Aer Lingus to help block a bid from Ryanair.

The guy and the establishment

O’Brien once described himself as different to Tony O’Reilly because he was an entrepreneur and O’Reilly was someone who ran companies. O’Brien likes to pitch himself as the guy who has taken on the establishment. But as his wealth and interests have grown – he was at one point deputy governor of the Bank of Ireland – he’s now part of that establishment.

There were early warning signs for APN’s board that it had problems with its biggest shareholder and that eventually matters might come to an ugly end.

INM holds a 29 per cent stake in APN, while O’Brien has a direct 3 per cent stake.